On my Linux and BSD machines I tend to run small X setups, without Gnome or anything. When I first used a pi about 10 years ago, I was surprised at the poor pe

On my Linux and BSD machines I tend to run small X setups, without Gnome or anything. When I first used a pi about 10 years ago, I was surprised at the poor performance. I thought about the X desktops I used 10 years before that (so 20 years ago), and about how their hardware was much worse than a pi. Yet it worked better. I think there's a few reasons for that. - Most obviously, software has bloated. This should be less so on a non-DE setup like I typically use, but, seems to be the case still. Within that, I can divide into: -- actual software bloat. Something like gtk+ is nowhere near as lean as it used to be -- the fact that the modern web is much more resource intensive than it used to be. It wasn't feasible to browse the web despite being a better CPU than I used for the web many years ago. -- I think I was using framebuffer based graphics drivers, at full HD. So maybe I paid a price for that, and a proper GPU accelerated X would do better - SD cards are slow. Maybe disk access over USB would do better.